NexDefense Announcement

ATLANTA (July 17, 2017) -- NexDefense, a global leader for industrial IoT (IIoT) environments and cybersecurity, today announced the next evolution of its flagship Sophia platform, which is now branded as the Integrity™ product suite.

Integrity 3.2, the first release under the Integrity name, empowers industrial control system operators with real-time visibility and awareness needed to improve system and process integrity, as well as ensure cyber resiliency. The software, available now, helps meet today’s industrial IoT and industrial cybersecurity challenges by establishing a baseline of normal control system network activities, continuously monitoring assets and communications, and identifying system design issues, misconfigurations, system failures, abnormal or malicious activities that could negatively impact production or safety.

Integrity™ 3.2 extends the powerful capabilities enabled in 3.1, while delivering capabilities that uniquely positions NexDefense to solve tangible customer challenges today like no other vendor in the industry. Highlights include:

Network Visualization – IntegrityTM Vision leverages automation to bring an improved out-of-the-box experience, allowing operators to be up and running within minutes. New configurable options allow operators to more easily see and assess data and communication types, paths, and more.

Rapid Detection Coupled with Behavioral Detection – Integrity is the only solution in the market that uniquely combines signature-less, behavioral anomaly detection with signature-based intrusion detection signatures (IDS) to detect and alert to risks within the ICS environment. Customers, vendors or integrators can write new signatures, and Integrity also accepts signatures from threat intelligence feeds to be applied for rapid detection and alerting, as well as for forensics at a later date. For example, an IDS capable of detecting WannaCry was made available by one of the threat intelligence agencies within a matter of hours of its outbreak.

Enhanced Performance and Resiliency – Existing customers have deployed hundreds of physical sites, with thousands of sites targeted in the near term, each containing many devices. The core platform has been enhanced to scale accordingly.

Support for NERC CIP v5 – Customers are leveraging Integrity to automate aspects of their ICS and assist operators with a variety of NERC CIP v5 requirements, including identification and categorization, electronic security perimeters, system security management and configuration change managment. Additionally, the GUI allows assets to be grouped, monitored and reported according to various NERC CIP designations.

New Industrial Protocol Support – Support for OPC has been added to an already extensive list of supported industrial protocols.

Cross-Pollination Across Products – Groups established by operators to organize their environment in Integrity Vision will find those same groupings inherited within Integrity Operations and vice-versa.

“Very little visibility into ICS communications or assets exists, especially in a holistic way, and operators have scant knowledge of what is normal and what is abnormal. The excess complexity and lack of visibility exposes operators to camouflaged risks,” noted Mike Assante, co-founder and chief security strategist for NexDefense. Consequently, Integrity combines asset inventory with start-of-the-art network visualization to provide deep visibility, operational awareness, and context to how these assets and networks operate on a daily basis.

“From a solution perspective, we have aligned our goals directly with our customers. Integrity achieves visibility and awareness into their mission critical networks, in order to ultimately improve their production and safety,” said Matt Morris, vice president of strategy and products for NexDefense. “The industry has been singularly focused on cybersecurity threats instead of being focused on a broader set of risks impacting production and safety. Integrity uniquely solves for the broader set of risks, enabling remediation and an improved bottom line.”

About NexDefense

NexDefense empowers industrial control system operators with the real-time knowledge needed to improve system and process integrity, and ensure cyber resilience. The 2016 Entrepreneurial Award Winner, NexDefense has been recognized by Frost & Sullivan and others as the market leading Industrial IoT and industrial cyber security solution, with deployments across mission critical networks in utilities, oil and gas, defense, manufacturing, water/ wastewater, pharmaceuticals and more. For more information, visit www.nexdefense.com and follow us on Twitter at @NexDefense..